Stella Zawistowski has another puzzle in the books.
MONDAY PUZZLE — How fun to see the constructor Stella Zawistowski, maker of some notoriously challenging indie puzzles, back in the New York Times Crossword with a nice, breezy Monday!
This is an excellent puzzle for testing out your theme detective skills — were you able to guess the revealer before you found it in the puzzle? I sure wasn’t, but as is often the case with Mondays, I blame my failure to grok the theme on my solving speed. One of these days, I’ll remember to slow down and savor these early-week puzzles, but today was not that day.
Nonetheless, if I had managed to take a breath to notice the theme as it unfolded, I think I could have used it to inform my solve. A clever solver who identifies the theme early can leverage that knowledge later in the puzzle to fill in theme entries with more certainty, which is certainly a useful solving skill. And with a theme like this one, you might even have been able to predict the final theme entry with a little thought.
Ah, well. As my mother always says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” (Hi, Mom.)
Tricky Clues
20A. An ALKALI is a basic (as in, the opposite of acidic on the pH scale) chemical compound that becomes a “Corrosive substance,” such as lye or sodium hydroxide, when concentrated.
22A. I love the clue “Toy that goes up slow and comes down fast” — I could not think of what this would be, so I was delighted by the mental image of a child slowly dragging a SLED up a hill and then flying back down on it.
36A. The “Grp. that extends from Canada to Chile” is the OAS, or Organization of American States. The abbreviation “Grp.” in the clue is an indication that the answer will also be an abbreviation.
37A. I laughed at “Lustful, informally” as the clue for RANDY, which I have only ever heard in the Austin Powers movies.
57A. When there’s a clue in quotation marks like this one, the entry will be a colloquial phrase that means approximately the same thing. In this case, “The very idea!” and I NEVER! are both fabulously old-fashioned ways of expressing outrage.
19D. The clue “Shpeak indishtinctly” includes the added clue of misspelling the words “speak indistinctly” as if they were being pronounced with a SLUR. This feels a bit as if it’s mocking a speech impediment, so I don’t love it, but I admit this is probably a hard word to clue! Maybe there could be a clue about the musical notation symbol that indicates that a set of notes should be played together, e.g. with the same UP-BOW (26D) or down-bow on a string instrument?
Today’s Theme
This puzzle is one for the bibliophiles out there who have a hard time deciding the type of book to pick up next. There are four theme entries, two of which are each a grid-spanning 15 letters long, and a revealer in the southwest corner with a clue that reads “What the start of 17-, 29-, 45- or 61-Across is, in a bookstore.” This revealer is GENRE, which describes each of the first words of the four theme entries.
The first of these is FANTASY BASEBALL (17A: “Pastime for armchair sports enthusiasts”), the first word of which is my personal favorite genre of book. Of course, as is often the case with this type of theme, the word fantasy in FANTASY BASEBALL has nothing to do with the literary genre of fantasy. The change in the meaning of the thematic word in the entry and its meaning vis-à-vis the revealer is a hallmark of this kind of theme — it wouldn’t really feel like wordplay if the meaning of fantasy were the same between the clue and the entry.
The same is true of the three other theme entries. The second themer is the hilarious MYSTERY MEAT, which also involves a meaning change between the mystery GENRE and the “Unidentifiable protein” that is MYSTERY MEAT. I’ll omit the explanations of the other two GENREs in the puzzle in the interest of preserving some of the MYSTERY, but you’ll notice that they, too, change meaning between their meaning in the context of the entry and that of the GENRE.
Constructor Notes
Although my marked preference as a solver is for the very hardest puzzles, as a constructor I’m perfectly happy to make easy ones. My favorite theme entry in this one is definitely MYSTERY MEAT, which brings back nostalgic (?) memories of high school hot lunches. I’m from Philadelphia, so the MYSTERY MEAT was often pork roll, an underrated product that I wish I could get where I live now (Brooklyn).
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